The Black, the Female and the Invisible.

The recent media obsession with identity, centered on presidential candidates who represent constituent groups other than white men, has created a public conversation about race and gender. The hope for those of us working in the justice sector is that the conversation pushes past the humdrum of the oppression olympics, but most of the talk to date has gone wasted on a battle of who has it worst--black men or white women. The loss is that at a time when concern and interest by voters is focused on issues of race and gender and we have a key opportunity to push the conversation in new directions, we are stuck with the terms set in stone in the post-Civil Rights language of oppositional identities.

Sentiments expressed in Maureen Dowd's misfire of a column the other day about "shoulder-pad" feminists supporting HIllary Clinton's nomination, is a perfect example of this obsession gone bad. We have come to expect the worst from Dowd, but assuming that racism and misogyny are in the past is a new low.

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America's sins are greater, and which stain should be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It's all about the past. What will be expunged more quickly? America's racial past or America's sexist past?

I'm not sure what Dowd means in calling the situation "the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics," but I don't think it's her frustration with a lack of intersectional analysis or the ways that women of color have been rendered invisible in the national dialogue of race and gender. Dowd's attempt at a post-racist, post-feminist consciousness is so clearly distorted by her hate for feminists and for women ( something very much in style right now) that it is no wonder that she is completely comfortable calling women that support Clinton un-fun, old, unattractive in her feeble attempts to coin a new pop-demographic category -- "shoulder pad feminists."

Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don't like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism.

They feel that women have moved past that men-are-pigs, woe-is-me, sisters-must-stick-together, pantsuits-are-powerful era that Hillary's campaign has lately revived with a vengeance....

As a woman I know put it: "Hillary doesn't make it look like fun to be a woman. And her 'I-have-been-victimized' campaign is depressing."

What is depressing is when women espouse anti-feminist, anti-woman tendencies and confirm the sexism at the root of people's fear in the potential for a woman to become president. There is nothing post-feminist about that, that is old-fashioned sexism. And of course, Obama totally makes it look fun to be a black dude, which is why he has garnered so much support. Right, of course, that must be it.

Ironic that the same voices that demand we end the battle of identity politics are the ones that are most reliant on it. So while Dowd is worried about which candidate looks like they are having "fun" those of us that are dealing with the issues in personal and practical ways have a different perspective. Both race and gender matter in this election not because Clinton is a woman and Obama is black, but because racism and sexism still exist and have profound impacts on policy. So while some continue the battle of who had it worst and who deserves the seat first, those of us working at the grassroots are very aware of the actual lives of people that are suffering from housing foreclosures, expansion in prisons, lack of access to health care, poor education and no jobs. For us, it is a matter of who will actually make decisions that most support our communities.

It is a key time to talk about race and gender in ways that matter. The mainstream media suggests we see the issues as just black and white, male and female, but we need a thorough recognition of the ways that all of our identities interact and the different places that puts us in the political spectrum. It's wishful thinking to hope a Clinton or Obama victory will somehow "erase the blemish" of sexism and racism and the people most directly hurt by racism and sexism are fully aware of this.

A Lab Is Set to Test the Gender of Some Female Athletes

By the time they arrive in Beijing, most athletes have resigned themselves to the possibility of undergoing a battery of tests for banned substances, like anabolic steroids and certain cough medicines.

But some female athletes may find they are asked to submit to an entirely different examination — one that will test whether they are, in fact, women.

Organizers of the Beijing Olympics have set up a sex-determination laboratory to evaluate “suspect” female athletes, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported Sunday. The lab is similar to ones set up at previous Olympics in Sydney and Athens, and will draw on the resources of the Peking Union Medical College Hospital to evaluate an athlete’s external appearance, hormones and genes.

Some medical ethicists have said the practice is too intrusive. “Real people are going to be hurt by this,” said Alice Dreger, an associate professor in medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University.

“Real Olympic athletes who have spent their whole life waiting for this moment.”

Although only athletes whose gender has been questioned will be tested in Beijing, the lab is a relic of an earlier Olympic era, when every female athlete was required to submit to a sex-verification test before competing in the Games. The tests emerged in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union and other Communist countries were suspected of entering male athletes in women’s events to gain an edge.

At first, women were asked to parade nude before a panel of doctors to verify their sex. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, officials switched to a chromosomal test.

The tests never unmasked a man posing as a woman, but they did turn up several athletes who were born with genetic defects that made them appear — according to lab results, at least — to be men. In 1967, the Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska was barred from the sport because she failed the chromosomal test, even though she had passed the nude test a year earlier. In the 1980s, the Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez Patino was disqualified because the test revealed, to her surprise, that she was born with a Y chromosome. Her eligibility was reinstated in 1988.

The practice came under increasing criticism in the 1990s by doctors, scientists and athletes who argued that the tests were not just invasive, but were also bad science. During the 1996 Atlanta Games, eight athletes failed the test, but all were later cleared of suspicion because it was determined that they had a birth defect that did not give them an unfair advantage.

“It was an unethical, unscientific and discriminatory practice,” said Arne Ljungqvist, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission and one of the most outspoken critics of the testing.

In 1999, Ljungqvist helped abolish the blanket testing of women, but international competitions have continued to rely on sex-verification tests in isolated instances.

“We must be ready to take on such cases should they arise,” Ljungqvist said. “Sometimes, fingers are pointed at particular female athletes, and in order to protect them, we have to be able to investigate it and clarify.”

Two years ago, middle-distance runner Santhi Soundarajan of India was stripped of her silver medal at the Asian Games after failing a verification test. Ljungqvist said an official who observed Soundarajan during the mandatory urine test for doping questioned her sex, and she later refused to submit to a more thorough exam.

Although the verification test has changed to adapt to new scientific understandings about gender — athletes are now evaluated by an endocrinologist, gynecologist, a geneticist and a psychologist — critics say the test is based on the false idea that someone’s sex is a cut-and-dried issue.

“It’s very difficult to define what is a man and what is a woman at this point,” said Christine McGinn, a plastic surgeon who specializes in transgender medicine.

Because of a range of genetic conditions, people who look like women may have a Y chromosome, while people who look like men may not, she said. Many times, the people do not learn of the defects until they reach adulthood. “It gets really complicated very quickly,” McGinn said.

Despite decades of rigorous testing of women athletes, only one known case of gender cheating exists in the history of the modern Olympics — and it was not uncovered by a sex-determination test.

In 1936, a German athlete named Dora Ratjen finished fourth in the women’s high jump. Twenty years later, Ratjen disclosed that he was in fact Hermann Ratjen, and that the Nazis had forced him to compete as a woman.